Chapter 7: Climax
Lightman had fidgeted in his office for a good ten minutes before shooting up from his desk and making his way towards Foster's office. When he opened the door, there she was: wearing jeans and another one of those silly t-shirts. This one was purple and read, "Live Loud." One of these days, Foster had to take this poor girl shopping.
She turned at the sound of the door opening, and tried to mask her fear with a smile.
"This is a nice place you've got here." She gave him time to respond, and when he didn't, she found more words to put into her mouth. "I was here before. You were out of town on business, and I got a grand tour. You know, most people can't get away with putting up tons of pictures of themselves in their own office, so congratulations."
He smiled. "I've redecorated. Loker's comments got a bit irritating."
"So," she said, "does Gillian know all of your secrets?"
"Does she know all of yours?"
"All the ones worth knowing. Will you please answer the question?"
Please? Was he on a game show? Well, she had done him the favor of making the first move, and she was trying to be polite.
"Not even close. A man my age has loads of secrets."
She let the answer hang in the air for a bit before picking up the conversation.
"I have a proposal: you tell me some of your secrets, and I'll tell you some of mine. That way, we can do whatever Gillian is trying to get us to do as quickly as possible."
He scoffed at that. Her? Learn some of his secrets? They'd make her head explode.
"A lot of the work I do is classified."
She wasn't thrown off at all. "I'm not asking for trade secrets, Dr. Lightman. Just ask me a personal question, and we'll see how it goes from there."
He thought about all of the things Foster had told him about Christine over the years. Was she the sort to be trusted? Of course, there was one thing he'd been curious about.
"What I couldn't figure out was why you don't have the same name as your own brother."
She smiled, apparently thankful that she'd been asked an easy one.
"Well, Foreman is my dad's last name, and Hyde was my mother's. They split up when I was little. They couldn't agree on custody, so we made it simple."
"That bad, eh?"
Lightman caught a mouth shrug before she answered.
"I was really young. I didn't really understand what was going on; I just remember a lot of yelling." She let go of a painful sigh. "You know, the strangest thing about my depression was that it brought my parents back together. It wasn't until I went to the hospital that my mother finally admitted that I'd inherited my mental illness from her and got treated. They get along great now."
The awkward silence that filled the room was heavy. The young woman's eyes darted around the room, as if searching for a new subject to talk about. When Foster appeared through the glass walls and waved as she walked past, both parties found relief. Christine was the first to speak.
"Foster is such a good name for her, don't you think? It describes her so well, how she takes care of people. Yours is pretty fitting, too. It's pretty poetic, actually."
His lips tightened. "Lightman's not my real name."
"What, are you a spy?"
Her question came with bright eyes and an amused smile that deflated when she saw Lightman staring at the floor.
"Well, it's my legal name, but it's not the one I was born with. My father's name was Mason. When my mother died, I changed it to her maiden name."
"Doesn't surprise me. You really loved her. "
She paused before asking the one thing she really wanted to know.
"Are you still in love with Gillian?"
Lightman was hoping for another bout of silence.
"I won't say anything, I promise. She wouldn't believe me, anyway." She tried to look into his eyes, but he wouldn't let her. "Sorry, I know I'm prying. It's just, it has been months since she got divorced."
Lightman didn't stop looking straight ahead, though his legs were twitching and he was fighting the urge to run.
"Look," she said, realizing the conversation was turning into more of a halting monologue, "you have so much leverage on me that there's no way I'm not going to keep it between us. Besides, I'm trustworthy. Gillian says so."
"And you think that means that you can poke around in somethin' that's none of your business?"
"Oh, come on. I know you love her. I could see it back then, and I see it now. You didn't act on it before, and I'm glad that you didn't."
"We were both married then." That's why her name was really appropriate. That's why he'd forced himself to use it, no matter what she called him back. He had to remind himself that she was Foster's girl.
"Right. That's why I'm glad you didn't; marriage is sacred. You two are both fiercely loyal, which is why you work so well together. But I won't pretend like I didn't see the temptation."
"It's not what you think." Why was he saying this to a woman he barely knew? Why did he feel the need to explain himself to her?
"She's affectionate to me because she misses him."
"Who, Alec?" Lightman answered the question with a confidant nod, but Christine's whole face objected.
"She's moved on. I'm sure of that. It took her a while to let go, but the second she signed those divorce papers, it was over. And after all the stuff he put her through . . . she's too smart to ever let him in again."
Lightman let go of a breath and kept shaking his head.
"You've never been married, you don't know what it's like. You get so used to that body lying next to you in bed, to the kisses on your way out the door, and when it's over, you miss it. Even when you hate your ex, you miss it. So, you try to find it somewhere else. That's what she's done." He let a deep breath go in and out. "I'm a stand-in."
As much as it hurt, it was also a relief to finally say the words. And after all, Christine had already seen him at his worst, and he'd seen her at hers. As uncomfortable and brief as their previous experience had been, it seemed to have forged a bond between them that they weren't aware of until now.
"But she cares about you. That much is easy to see."
"She takes care of me. That's diff'rent. You're too young, you don't understand."
"Then tell me."
"When I met her, it was a lot like when she met you. I was her patient first, her friend after. Gillian Foster has spent every second since then taking care of me. I fall, she picks me up. Every time."
The expression on the woman's face was more than compassion. It was empathy. He'd forgotten what that felt like. He could tell that she was trying to word her next sentence carefully.
"So, you think that she sees herself as your caretaker? You think she can't ever feel for you, romantically?"
"It didn't matter if she did, I wouldn't deserve her." He almost choked trying to get those words out. His throat was burning, and if he wasn't careful, his eyes would overflow. "I fell for her that first day. I was so stupid—I didn't even realize it until my wife left me. Not even after you told me point blank."
"I shouldn't have said it. It was wildly inappropriate. I was lashing out."
He offered her a small smile. "If you saw it, my ex probably did too. But I was loyal to her, to the very last. In a way, I still am."
"It's kind of ironic, isn't it? Gillian's moved on, and you haven't."
"She knows it, too. She reads me like you read books." He rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands.
"And yet, she doesn't know that you love her?"
"She didn't know that Alec was cheatin' on her, even though it was written all over his face. You know, she defended him to me? Told me his lies about his mistress bein' his sponsor. Most of her believed him, too. And now, every time she touches me, I know it's because she misses him."
"How do you know it's him and not you?"
"I know, trust me."
Christine pondered a bit in silence before responding.
"I'm not going to lie; I know she really loved Alec." He smiled at the disgust that appeared on her face as she said his name. "She spent years holding that marriage together, and he kept pushing her away. You know as well as I do that she adopted Sophie partly to strengthen their relationship. I've never seen someone who was so good at hiding her own self-destruction." More empathy. "But I know two things: when Gillian lets go, Gillian lets go."
"And the other thing?"
"Gillian doesn't use people. Not for anything." No shrugs of any kind, no other deception leakage. She believed it.
"Not on purpose, you mean."
"She's better than that. You can see if people are lying; Gillian can see who people are. She knows that you're you. What she doesn't know is what you want, and you're going to have to explain that to her if you want to break free of this self-imposed captivity you've got going."
"When I get close, she pulls away."
"Well, yeah. Of course she's scared, that's why you have to be gentle and go slowly. You know her father was an alcoholic, and I wouldn't be surprised if he hit her. Then she gets married, and her husband ends up snorting coke? That's enough to make a woman run to a nunnery."
They both laughed, despite themselves. Lightman playfully nudged Christine with his shoulder.
"She taught you well, you know. You're not that bad of a shrink." She gave him a humble smile.
He looked over at her before he followed her gaze, staring straight ahead through the glass at the people going back and forth. There they stood: two people who knew the price of honesty. Two people who bore the names of their mentally ill mothers, and who had breathed in sorrow and spat it back out.
Two people who owed everything to a Dr. Gillian Foster.
When Lightman returned to the lab, his new friend following close behind, Loker looked like he was about to explode. With Reynolds, Foster, and Torres looking on, he wasted no time telling the newcomers that he had solved the puzzle.
"It's like that soccer play I saw yesterday," he explained. "Christine stole the ball and passed it to her teammate. While everybody turned their attention to the girl with the ball, Christine was able to move freely towards the goal."
"Yeah," Christine confirmed, "it would have been impossible to get the ball through all of the girls on the other team."
"Exactly. You used a distraction to get into position. So did the kidnapper."
"This is a kidnapping after all?" Reynolds seemed torn between being relieved that he'd received an answer and being frustrated at all the times that answer had changed.
"Yes. Perdita Greenwood was the diversion. By demanding a ransom, one thing was bound to happen that hadn't happened in fifteen years: Silas Kasim would have to leave his house."
A light bulb went on in Foster's brain. "So he could get robbed," she said. She was as surprised at her words as the others were. "But, I saw the inside of his house. There wasn't anything in there worth stealing."
"The manuscripts," Christine said. "Remember those stacks of paper he had all over his house? Those were the drafts of almost every book in the American canon. They're worth a fortune."
"I didn't figure it out until I saw this on the tape." Loker pulled up the video of Kasim's estate on the screen and paused it on the face of the female security guard. The right corner of her mouth was up and back, her eyes down.
"Contempt, shame, and pleasure," Lightman said. "She's it." He tried not to look Foster's way.
"He was too private," Loker said. "The only people who would have known about Greenwood and had access to the estate would have been on his security team. But, she still needs him to leave, so she took his girlfriend and made him drop the ransom off at the Lincoln Memorial, about an hour drive from his house, with traffic. You add the two hours he waited, plus the travel time, and you've got a big enough window to get in and get out."
Reynolds didn't waste any time calling it in. Now, the chase was on.
